Um, is anyone worried about this?

This article from Inside Higher Ed is scary! In 2006 Google secretly purchased Paper of Record, a a digital archive of early newspapers which then disappeared. In that collection were many Mexican newspapers. Digital archives are a lot easier for one entity to control–control access to, availability, what is included, and what disappears forever. It’s not like a physical archive, where a piece of information or artifact has a presence that takes up space that someone would notice missing. A digital archive is basically floating in space.

The other part of this is that Google is just one corporation. Are there going to be international standards in place for digital content? Is Google going to make people pay for access?